Table of contents

"Finland is covered with forests," a Finnish tourism Web site explains helpfully. "Finns harvest the trees to make paper. And then they use the paper to write sad songs about the life they left behind in the forest."
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The Nobel Prize is the peak honor in physics. Yet this year it celebrated not science, but technology: "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit-the CCD sensor." The winners were two IEEE Fellows from Bell Telephone Laboratories, Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith. Two other IEEE Fellows and former Bell Labs colleagues, Michael F. Tompsett and Eugene I. Gordon, say the Nobel committee h...
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The encryption technology used to prevent eavesdropping in GSM (Global System for Mobile communications), the world's most widely used mobile phone system, is a Swiss cheese of security holes, according to an expert who plans to poke a big hole of his own.
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At NYC Resistor, a communal hacker space in downtown Brooklyn, N.Y., we do two things really well-hack and party. An automated bartender seemed like a natural, but as we searched the U.S. patent database for ideas, it became clear we'd have to hack one up ourselves. And so we have. An ongoing series of them, in fact.
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Housewives of superconductivity [review of Superconductivity: A Very Short Introduction (Blundell, S.; 2009)]

No woman has yet won one of the three top mathematics awards- the Fields, the Abel, or the Wolf. It's part of what's often called the math gender gap, which in the United States starts early-at least twice as many boys as girls score in the 99th percentile on state level math assessment tests.
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Micromechanical resonators are often fabricated from silicon, using techniques similar to those employed in making microelectronic circuits. Perhaps the simplest resonator that can be made this way is a beam fixed at both ends and excited using an electrode placed under the freely suspended middle portion. Oscillatory signals applied to this electrode induce vibrations in the beam.
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This article speaks about the nuclear waste solution in Finland. Posiva, the Finnish company building an underground repository here, says it knows how to imprison nuclear waste for 100 000 years. These multimillennial thinkers are confident that copper canisters of Scandinavian design, tucked into that bedrock, will isolate the waste in an underground cavern impervious to whatever the future brin...
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In November of 2008, the backup batteries unexpectedly failed at a power plant in the Gaza Strip. Almost anywhere else, the incident would have been a blip, forgotten a week later. But this is Gaza-blockaded by Israel and Egypt and cut off from the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank. It's a place where more than a million and a half people inhabit a strip of land not even one-third th...
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When Prithviraj Banerjee arrived at HP Laboratories, in Palo Alto, Calif., as the organization's new director in August 2007, he was intent on pushing the researchers to swing big. HP Labs, a sprawling enterprise with some 500 researchers spread over seven locations worldwide, is the company's advanced research arm, spending about US $150 million annually. The first commercially available LED, the...
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n 1874, the University of Berlin refused to grant a doctorate to the Russian mathematical genius Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya, who turned around and got one at the rival University of Göttingen; even so, she had to emigrate to Sweden to find a teaching job. Eight years later in the United States, Johns Hopkins University refused to grant Christine Ladd-Franklin a Ph.D., although she'd done her di...
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